Tom Morello's a busy guy. Though his Audioslave band is defunct, he still occasionally reunites with his old Rage Against the Machine partners, plays in the hip-hop-oriented side project Street Sweeper Social Club, records on his own as the Nightwatchman, and sits in with lots of different people, seemingly all the time. RATM and SSSC are too abrasive for my tastes, and I always found Audioslave a bit bland, so I'm most partial to the Nightwatchman albums, which are firmly routed in the protest song tradition championed by Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Billy Bragg and many others. His righteous anger is still there, but he doesn't use it with quite so much bludgeoning force. I particularly like the post-Hurricane Katrina anthem "Whatever It Takes," from the 2008 Nightwatchman album, "The Fabled City." Check it out:

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